Having made up my mind to trust myself to the White Horse, I entered a large,salle-à-manger, which, after the glare of the mid-day sunshine, seemed as dark as a cellar that is lighted by a small air-hole. The shutters had been closed against the heat and the flies, but the rays that broke through had the ardour and brilliancy cast by molten metal in a smelting-house, and the sight very quickly accepted with relief the lessened light of the room. There was one other person present, and, although the table was long enough to accommodate fifty, my plate was set immediately opposite his. He was a young negro gentleman, with such a shining ebony skin that he was almost refreshing to eyes that had just left the dazzling whiteness of the outer world. He gave me the impression of being a rather conceited African, but this may have been because my dress compared so unfavourably with his. He was the son of a merchant at St. Louis in Senegal, and was just like a Frenchman in all but his colour. I asked him if he found the weather we were having sufficiently warm, and he replied:
'Regardez comme je sue!'
True enough, the beads of perspiration glistened upon his forehead like black pearls. What is the use, I thought, of being an African if one cannot keep dry in a temperature of 95° Fahrenheit?
I soon left my dark acquaintance, and went forth to roam about Bazas, which, like so many little old towns of Southern France, is in the early hours of a summer afternoon as quiet and deserted as a cemetery. The stones are so heated that a cat that begins to cross the road lazily, stopping to stretch or examine something in the gutter, will suddenly start off at a rush as if a devil had been cast into it.
The interest of Bazas to the traveller lies mainly in its church, which was formerly a cathedral. Its broad and imposing façade, encrusted with ornament, chiefly in the florid Gothic of the fifteenth century, but disfigured by a hideous eighteenth-centuryfrontonthat crowns the gable, stands at the top of a broad and rather steepplace, of which some of the houses are of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The tower built against the northern end of the front carries a lofty and graceful crocketed spire. Until the Revolution, this west front, ornamented as it was with nearly three hundred statues, was considered the most elaborately decorated in the South of France. Even now, although so many of the niches are vacant, it is exceedingly rich in sculpture. The central doorway is so lofty that it occupies more than half the height of the original façade, and the doorway on each side of it is only a little lower. The central tympanum is divided into five compartments filled with figures in relief. The uppermost panel represents the Last Judgment. The interior admirably combines grandeur and lightness. The nave (without transept) is very long and lofty, and, together with its clerestory, is beautifully proportioned. Finally, the effect of a delightful vista is obtained by the wide sanctuary. With its lofty and airy arcade separating it from thepourlour.
[Illustration: BAZAS.]
All the old part of the town is built upon a rocky hill, and it is still almost surrounded by ruinous ramparts. The church is just within the wall on the side where the rock is precipitous. Looking upward from the bottom of the narrow valley, the view of the ramparts high overhead, tapestried with ivy and other plants, and above these the tabernacle work, the crocketed pinnacles and spire, and the fantastic far-stretching gargoyles of the venerable cathedral, makes one feel that joy of the eye and the spirit which is the wanderer's reward for all the sun-scorch and other petty tribulations he may have to endure in searching for the picturesque.
From Bazas I made my way to Villandraut, a neighbouring town of about 1,000 inhabitants. I had left the vines, and was now in thelandesof the Gironde. I was surrounded by pines, gorse, and bracken, which last was as brown as if it had been baked in an oven. Ten summers had nearly passed since I undertook my long walk through the great pine forests of the Landes. I had wandered on and on, and was again drawing near to them. Already the country wore much the same appearance as that farther south, although less wild and desolate. I expected to have a return of the old feelings when I found myself again in the midst of the pines that said so much to me years ago; but somehow the old spirit would not come back, and I felt little besides the heat and the weariness of the way.
Villandraut, ordinarily a very dull place, was exceedingly animated when I walked into it. A fair was being held there, and a fair in a village or rural town is always a reason for being gay, and often an excuse for worse. There was some local colour here. All the young girls wore the Bordelaise coiffure, the handkerchief being generally of white, yellow, green, or crimson silk. Just clinging to the back of a young head, no coif is more graceful or picturesque than this. There was much dancing. Cheeks flushed and dark eyes flashed as the brilliant coifs and light-coloured dresses whirled round and round. I found more feminine beauty in this south-eastern corner of the Bordelais than I had seen for a very long time among the French peasants. The young women here are well and delicately formed, and have an erect and graceful carriage. They are coquettes from their childhood. They have fine eyes and luxuriant tresses, and the face often shows richness of colour. A fewblondesare seen among thebrunes; but whether fair or dark they have all the same exuberance of nature. The teeth are rarely good after early youth. The cause of this blemish is said to be the water, which, passing through a sandy soil, contains little or no lime.
My motive in coming to this place was to see the ruined castle of Villandraut, the gloomy stronghold built at the commencement of the fourteenth century by Bertrand de Goth (or Got), Archbishop of Bordeaux, who afterwards as Pope Clement V. took the momentous step of transferring the Papal See from Rome to Avignon. I found it a little outside the burg, but near enough to be used by many of the peasants who had come into the fair as a convenient place for putting up their carts and stabling their animals. Each of the towers had been turned into a stable for horses and oxen, and scattered over the weedy space within the walls were vehicles of all sorts and sizes.
The plan of the castle is a vast oblong, with a high cylindrical tower at each angle, and two additional towers on the side of the town. The deep and wide moat that still surrounds it, except where it has been filled up in front of the gateway from which the drawbridge was once raised and lowered, is like a ravine that is choked with brambles and shrubs. The exterior view is very striking. It is impossible to approach this ruin without being impressed by its mournful grandeur. From all these piled-up stones which the wild plants strive to cover, there comes the sentiment of pride in death. A very slow but a certain death it is. One after another the stones will continue to fall as they have been falling for centuries, and will be put to fresh uses. How many houses and pigsties at Villandraut have been built with materials taken from the castle? Nobody knows exactly, but everybody in the place has a shrewd suspicion on the subject. I climbed up the dilapidated spiral staircase of one of the towers, and after passing through two guard-rooms with Gothic vaulting, where the wind, now blowing up for storm, moaned through the loopholes, I came out upon thechemin de ronde, quite overgrown with shrubs and ivy. All around stretched the pine forest, with tints of violet and the purple rose deepening in the misty distance.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE CHÂTEAU DE VILLANDRAUT.]
This bastille on the edge of the sandy desert was a queer sort of fold for a shepherd to build. To judge the past, however, by the present is one of the most mischievous of errors. Nothing is easier than to criticise the actions of men in a bygone age, and nothing is more difficult than to do justice to their motives. The militant bishop is intolerable now even, when he is nothing more formidable than a controversialist. It may have been necessary, however, in the Middle Ages for him to make himself dreaded as well as respected, like the judges of Israel. This Clement V., at any rate, must have believed in the need of the Church to be able to defend itself behind strong walls.
From Villandraut I turned towards the Garonne. A furious storm was now raging southward, and after nightfall the lightning flashes kept the whole forest seemingly ablaze. The hour was late when I reached the town of Langon by the river, and at the inn where I put up I met with a cold dinner as well as a cold reception.
When the sun came again I took the road to St. Macaire, and this soon crossed the Garonne. The broad blue river was very beautiful in the early morning sunshine, and a mild lustre lay over the vine-clad plain beyond. The vintagers were getting busy. Bullock-waggons were waiting with the barrels, now empty, that were to bear the grapes to the wine-press, and here and there amidst the green of the motionless leaves was the gleam of a white, yellow, or crimson coif that moved with the head of the woman or girl who wore it.
[Illustration: THE GARONNE.]
The morning had not lost its freshness when I reached St. Macaire. This is one of those ruinous old towns of the Bordelais where the traveller, if he were an artist, would find a thrilling subject for his pencil at every street corner, and at the angle of every bastion of crumbling rampart, where the bramble, the ivy, and the wild fig-tree strike their roots between the gaping stones. Proud and strong in the centuries that have been left far behind, St. Macaire is now a little spot of slow life in the midst of a wilderness of ruins. Three walls encircled it, and although these did long service as the quarries wherefrom the inhabitants drew such building stone as they needed, yet have they not been demolished, but tell their whole story still, in spite of wide gaps and breaks—ay, and with a far more soul-moving voice than when they could show to the enemy their crenated parapets without a flaw, when not a stone was wanting to any tower or gateway, and when the twang of the cross-bow might have been heard from every loophole. There are heaps of stones where the lizard runs, where the coiled snake basks untroubled, where the dwarfed fig-tree sprouts when the spring has come, and where the wild cucumber pushes forward its yellow flowers that fear not the flame of summer. The fig-tree may also be seen hanging from high walls, and the vine rambles among blooming or embrowned wallflowers on the top of ruinous gateways, through which the people still enter and leave the town as they did centuries ago.
The spirit of originality that animated the mediaeval architects in this part of France, and which has given to so many churches a distinct character, an individual expression, that keeps the interest of the traveller constantly alive, is strongly marked upon the church of St. Macaire. Commenced at the beginning of the twelfth century, its earliest portions show the Pointed style in its infancy, fearful as yet of committing what seemed so like heresy—a departure from the Roman arch; but in the same building a much bolder Gothic asserts itself in the parts that were added in the thirteenth century. The west front and doorway have not the majesty of the style as it was developed chiefly in the North, but they have that venerable air which is not always to be found in the stately and majestic. The low tympanum is crowded with figures belonging to the period when the statuary's art was still swathed in the swaddling clothes of its new infancy, and what with their own uncouthness, and the wear and tear of time, it is no easy matter now to trace in them all the purpose and meaning of the sculptor.
And yet in their blurred and battered state they tell us much more than they would if they had been restored with the best skill and learning of our own time. The age is gone when these bas-reliefs were the religious books of the people. To imitate them is mere aestheticism, and to restore them is often destruction.
A few words must be said of the old market-place of St. Macaire. Thanks to the poverty or the apathy of the commune, three sides have retained all their mediaeval character, the interest of which has been refined and deepened by the artistic touch of time, the sentimental ravisher, the slow and gentle destroyer. A Gothic arcade encloses a wide pavement, and each bay, with its vaulting, forms, as it were, the portico of the house, whose first and higher storeys rest upon it. Here those who are interested in civic architecture can see thirteenth and fourteenth century houses still retaining their wide Gothic doorways.
I rested awhile in a café, and chance led me to one that was kept by an Englishman. He recognised my nationality, while I supposed him to be a Frenchman, and he seemed as glad to see me as if I had been an old friend. He told me that when he was a boy his father brought his family from England to Les Eyzies, where he was employed at the iron works. (The smelting furnace has been cold for many a year.) The man who spoke was middle-aged, and although he expressed himself with difficulty in English, and turned his phrases out of French moulds of thought, he had kept a strong accent of the Midland counties. The tenacity with which an accent adheres to the tongue, even when the language to which it belongs has been half lost, is very remarkable. I remember meeting in my roamings an Englishwoman who had married a French cobbler, and who had been buried alive with him in the Haut-Quercy for forty years. She had learnt to speak patois like a native, but it had become a sore trial to her to put her thoughts into English words; nevertheless, when she did bring out those words that had been so long put away in the mind's lumber-room, the accent was as pure Cockney as if she had but lately drifted away from her own Middlesex.
The freshness of the morning was gone, and even in the shade of the cafe I felt the hot breath of the day. When I was again upon the powdered road between interminable rows of vines, the glare was dazzling; but I was not alone. Groups of people were trudging under the same fiery sky, and upon the same dusty road, and all were moving in the same direction. When I learnt that they were pilgrims on their way to Verdelais, I thought that I might do worse than be a pilgrim, too. I therefore went with the stream, which soon turned up the flanks of the vine-clad hills.
Thus I found myself about noon in a small village, seemingly composed of one wide street lined on both sides with cafés and restaurants. There was also a very conspicuous modern church in a fantastic and debased, but showy, style of architecture. It was densely crowded, and the shine of innumerable candles was seen through the open doors. The whole street was likewise crowded with people, who had come from various parts of the Bordelais, and who seemed determined to spend a happy day in a sense no less material than spiritual. There was a great rush to the restaurants, and there was flagrant overcharging on the part of those who kept them—all speculators on piety.
Perhaps the grandeur of the solitude of Roc-Amadour, the antiquity of the buildings, and the simplicity of the pilgrims had made me a wrong-headed judge of the newer places of pilgrimage. However this may be, after the first glance at Verdelais I wished I had not come. There was no quiet corner here where a wayfarer could sit and refresh himself; in this hurly-burly of eager hunger, and with this infernal clatter of tongues, repose was impossible.
After lunching in the midst of a noisy and vulgar throng, I regained the open country, with the conviction that, should I ever decide to start off upon a serious pilgrimage, the road to Verdelais would not be the one that I would take.
I now turned down towards the valley through the vines, the inevitable vines, and was soon on the banks of the Garonne. Almost facing me upon the opposite hillsides were the famous vineyards of Sauterne, and I knew that the vintagers were busy there, every woman—women are chiefly employed—with her pair of scissors snipping off the grapes one by one from the gathered bunches, and rejecting all that were not sound. It is a costly method, but the wine pays for it.
A steamer comes panting down the river, and stops near the grove of willows where I have been trying to hide myself from the all-searching, all-burning sun. I go on board and take a delicious rest under an awning for two or three hours, while the vine-covered hills on either side glide backward with their many steeples and towers.
I left the steamer at a place called Castres, some fifteen miles below Bordeaux. My motive for stopping here was to see the castle where Montesquieu was born, and where he spent the greater part of his life. The map told me that it lay some five or six miles from Castres in the direction of thelandes, and as the day was already far spent, I reckoned upon passing the night at the small town of La Brède, which is very near the castle. The sun's rays were as yet but little calmed as I turned from the broad, blue river.
I had to follow the highway, on which the white dust lay thick. This road was carried up the hills. In the vineyards were crowds of men and women, many of whom had been drawn out of the slums of Bordeaux. Some of them were forlorn-looking beings, whose faces told that they were glad to seize this opportunity of earning for a few days a sure wage. Those who wish to feel the poetic charm of the vintage should not go into the district of Bordeaux to seek it. Here only the legend remains. It is not that the vines are wanting. The Bordelais, except in the sandy and pine-covered region of thelandes, has again become one immense vineyard; but whether it be from the struggle to live, or the lust of prosperity, the people fail to impress the traveller with that communicative openness and joyousness of soul which he would like to find in them, if only that he might not have the vexation of convicting himself of laying up for his own fancy another disillusion.
Although the hills were not steep, the long ascent was wearisome in the sultry air that no breath of wind freshened. At length the sun went down in a golden haze, where the vine-leaves spread to the horizon like the sea. Then I descended the other side of the range of hills that follows the line of the river. The vineyards gradually fell away, and scattered pines gave a touch of sadness to the darkening land. By these signs I knew that I was on the outskirts of thelandesof the Gironde. But the sand was still some miles away, and the country here was well cultivated. A church spire that looked very high in the clear obscure, as I saw it through an opening of trees, led me to La Brède.
Here I thought I should have no difficulty in finding night quarters, for there was at least one good inn, which in its own estimation was a hotel. But the way in which I was scrutinized when I wearily set down my knapsack on an outside table and took a seat under the plane-trees told me that I was not welcome. Since I had been in the Bordelais I had become rather too familiar with such signs. The hotel-keepers here have but very slight faith in the respectability of travellers who do not come in the usual way—that is to say, by train or omnibus, or something with wheels, though it be but a bicycle. To them the walking traveller, whether he carries a bundle over his shoulder on a stick, or a knapsack on his back (the latter is very rarely seen), is merely a tramp. If he speaks with a foreign accent, he is doubly deserving of suspicion. These people of the Gironde are, perhaps, all the more doubtful of the morality of others because of the little confidence that they are able to place in their own.
My request for a room at this inn was not refused immediately. There was a consultation indoors, the result of which was that I was presently told that every room was already engaged. There was nothing for it but to walk on to the next inn, and hope for better luck there. It would seem as if they had been prepared here for my coming, and had already made up their minds how to act. Two women stood in the doorway, and did not move an inch to make way for me. I had hardly asked the question about the room, when the answer came emphatically 'No.' At the next house to which I went I met with the same answer; but in spite of the unpleasantness of my position, I was almost thankful for it, such a villainous-looking place it was. There now remained but one small auberge at La Brède. If I was denied shelter there, I should have to go to Bordeaux that night, and I was five miles from the nearest railway-station. The prospect had become sombre, and I began to regret that I had allowed the Château de Montesquieu to entice me among these too civilized savages.
The last inn was a little outside the town. A dark man, whose face, even in the feeble light, I could see was deadly pale, was seated outside the door, breathing the freshness that now began to be felt in the evening air. As my previous negotiations had been with women, I was glad to perceive now an innkeeper of the other sex. My experience of the French provinces had taught me that, wherever people are suspicious of strangers whose appearance is not such as they are familiar with, and where the measure of prosperity has been sufficient to produce a cautious disinclination to move out of the daily trodden track, it is far better to deal with men than with women.
The pale-faced man, after looking at me fixedly for a few seconds, said:
'Yes, I have one spare room, and it is at your service.'
I crossed the threshold, and took a seat in the kitchen and general room. The surroundings were not very cheerful; but no other people would have anything to do with me, and therefore my choice of accommodation had to be what is termed Hobson's. After all, it would not be the first time that I had passed the night in a little roadside inn.
The pale man's wife did not look in a very sweet temper at her husband for having put extra work upon her without consulting her, and there was an exceedingly obnoxious boy of about fourteen who sat upon the corner of a table and, with the assurance of a mounted gendarme, put all sorts of questions to me in a voice that would change suddenly from a bark to a bleat. I was seized with such a longing to knock him off his perch that I presently kept my eyes fixed upon the frying-pan so that I might not be tempted beyond my strength. The father was evidently too weak to contend with his horrible offspring. My interest in the man was at once awakened. He told me that he was from the Lot-et-Garonne, where he owned land, and had been a tobacco-planter, until a disease of the spinal marrow compelled him to seek an occupation that required less exertion. Thus he came to be an innkeeper. He had spent much money upon doctors, who had done him little or no good. The only treatment that had given him any relief wasla pendaison.
'Hanging!'
'Yes, hanging. I have passed hours hung up by the neck.'
Then he explained the apparatus that is used for stretching the spinal marrow in this manner, and how it differs from the method of hanging that is best known in England. When I learnt what he had undergone in order to get cured, I could understand why he looked so pale and sad. A melancholy Jacques was he, indeed, in appearance, and he was certainly not the most cheerful of hosts whom one might hope to find at the end of a weary day; but I knew that I was in the house of an honest man, who was also brave and patient, while he looked out upon the world through darkening windows.
Before going to bed I had some talk with my host about my adventures at La Brède before I applied to him for a night's lodging. There was actually a sparkle of mirth in his melancholy dark eyes, and his sunken cheeks were puckered up with a sort of smile.
'If you had been dressed in a black coat,' said he, 'like acommis voyageur, they would have all found room for you.'
This was my opinion, too. The Bordelais believe in the respectability of no travelling motives under heaven that are not commercial.
My bedroom that night had much the character of an outhouse or fowlhouse. It was on the ground-floor, and the rafters overhead sloped rapidly towards the exterior wall. A small low window opened upon the garden. The walls were white-washed, but the floors were very black, as all these southern floors are. Upon the single table a heap of raw wool waiting to be spun had been pushed back a little to make room for the doll's washing-basin and towel that had been placed there for me. Besides the bed that had been prepared for me, there was another, which happily was to remain unoccupied that night. The traveller should always be thankful when he has a room, however poor and plain, that for the few hours which he needs for rest he can call his own. If he snores himself, he will sleep through the noise, and have, perhaps, pleasant dreams; but if anybody else snores in the same room, he may lie awake with clenched fists, and be tortured by the foolish desire to throw something.
The next morning I believe I was the earliest visitor who in modern times has troubled the serenity of the Château de la Brède. A mist—one of the first of the falling year—lay white and dense upon the land. It was a fine-weather mist, such as in the opinion of the wine-grower helps to ripen the grapes.
I had entered the park about half a mile beyond the town, and then between two rolling banks of vapour I saw the high walls and higher towers of the castle looming through the grayness. A little later I distinguished the dull water of the very wide moat, and the three connected bridges, which were formerly blank spaces between low towers, unless the drawbridges happened to be let down.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU DE MONTESQUIEU.]
Over these the visitor must now pass in order to reach the castle. As I was so early, I killed time to my own good by trying to fix some impressions of the vast pile of masonry that stood here in the middle of a little lake. It is an extraordinary block of architectural patchwork, quite without symmetry, and yet the mass is imposing. The ground-plan approaches the circle more than any other geometrical figure, but it is a circle with slices cut off, and composed of angles so irregular as almost to imply a fantastic motive. But the motive was purely utilitarian. The feudal fortress which was built here in the thirteenth century underwent in subsequent ages so many modifications and additions with a view more to the comfort of the dwellers therein than to their protection from enemies, that in course of time little of the mediaeval buildings remained besides the great hall, the basement, and the keep. These became jumbled up with late Gothic and Renaissance work.
Jean de Secondat, who purchased the old fortified manor-house out of his savings asmaítre d'hôtelto Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, was probably responsible for most of the sixteenth-century work that one now sees. When his descendant, Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu, took possession, the building was almost identical with that which exists to-day. It has been exceptionally favoured, for it has remained in the family, and for at least two hundred years it has undergone none of those alterations which in previous times had so changed its appearance. The eye may not be delighted with its symmetry, but the mind has the satisfaction of knowing that this was verily the birthplace and home of him who more than any other man made political science popular.
The present owner of the castle, recognising the duty that the descendant of a great man owes to society, receives with the most liberal courtesy all those who make a pilgrimage to this spot.
The relics of Montesquieu are numerous, and they have been preserved with admirable solicitude. The room where he slept and wrote is almost the same as when he finally left it; with this difference, that time has made everything look dingier. Even the white linen curtains which hung at the window hang there still, and they are by no means so yellow as one might expect them to be. On the plain little table at which he washed himself stand his basin and ewer. The basin would be called to-day a dish, for it is not more than two inches deep. It held quite enough water, however, to serve for the ablutions of a baron a century and a half ago. Much the same notion of what is fit and proper in a washingbasin remains to this day among the French peasantry, and even among the middle class in the provinces the growth of the toilet crockery has been far from rapid since the time of Montesquieu.
The bed in which the political philosopher slept is a broad four-poster, not with slender and finely carved posts, like Fénelon's, but severely simple. Indeed, in none of the furniture of this room is there any indication of the love of the ornamental. On the contrary, everything tells of a mind that set no value upon aught but the strictly needful. Montesquieu's small writing-case, divided into compartments, the borders of the leather covering embellished with dingy, half-obliterated gold ornament, was perhaps the finest bit of property he had before his eyes as he sat and worked there. He always carried it about with him when he travelled. No doubt it went with him to England, and he probably wrote letters to his friend Lord Chesterfield upon it. And here is his travelling trunk. It still looks fit to bear many years' rough usage; and yet, if railway porters had to pull it about, they would not know whether to laugh at its strange appearance or to swear at its weight. It was built for wear, like Noah's ark, and it is entirely covered with leather, elaborately decorated with patterns, composed of the round heads of small nails. The high stone chimney-piece, plain and solid like the character of the man who did so much lasting work in this room, remains, together with the fire-dogs, as it was in his time.
Montesquieu formed the habit when thinking alone of leaning back in his chair before the hearth and resting his feet against one of the jambs of the chimney-piece. The stone was much worn away by his feet; but the marks would pass unobserved if the knowledge of their cause had not been preserved in the family. A bust of Montesquieu made in his life-time shows him with closely-cropped hair, and without a wig. It is a remarkably Caesar-like head, every feature indicating the decision and positivism of the Roman character—such a one, indeed, as ideally became the author of the 'Considerations.' But how the face is altered when we look at it in another portrait—a painted one, representing the writer in a great wig as President of the Parliament of Guyenne! A head becomes another head if the coiffure be but changed.
A little room adjoining this one was where Montesquieu's secretary worked. He was the drudge of a literary man, who was probably not exempt from the constitutional irritability of those who carry a whirling grindstone within their brains for the sharpening and polishing of thought. The unremembered scribe may have done good service to literature while undergoing his purgatory in this world.
Distributed throughout this suite of apartments on the ground-floor is much furniture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, most of which was here when Montesquieu waschâtelain.
A spiral staircase leads to the great hall of the old castle. It has been very carefully preserved, and although the walls are now lined with book-shelves, it keeps the air of baronial grandeur and simplicity. Montesquieu made it his library, and had reading-desks set up all down the middle. His books remain, as well as some of his manuscripts, including that of 'Les Lettres Persanes.' This long hall is covered by a plain barrel-vault, and at the far end is an immense chimney-place, the chimney built out at the base several feet from the line of the wall, and sloping back towards the ceiling. On the plain (not conical) surface of this mediaeval chimney are painted figures, said to be of the thirteenth century, but probably later. One can distinguish a king, a cardinal, and a page on horseback. The mediaeval fireplates are still in their old place at the back of the vast hearth.
I have little more to add to this story of my wanderings. From La Brède I went to Bordeaux, where I found much to admire that I had not noticed before. The architecture of this city is incomparably richer than that of Paris by the diversity of style and the good fortune that has protected so many of the buildings from the destructive influences of war, fanaticism, and the presumption of those who in all ages would abolish the past if they could, and refashion the world according to their own ideas. The Roman period is only represented by a fragment of the amphitheatre, now called the Palais Gallien. But what a picturesque fragment this is, and how well it introduces the visitor to the study of the Romanesque, the Gothic, and the Renaissance buildings, of which he will find such characteristic examples here! The interest of the Englishman will be increased by the knowledge that some of the most notable of the Gothic edifices were raised when to his countrymen Bordeaux was a continental London, and a well-known tendency of his will probably lead him to attribute much of their grave stateliness to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon character.
[Illustration: THE GARONNE AT BORDEAUX.]
The people of Bordeaux are supposed to have derived not a little of their keen commercial spirit from the English. If this be so, they may take credit for having in some respects surpassed their teachers. By the gift of persuasiveness and the abundance of words, by aplomb, combined with astuteness, they are fitted by nature to be the most successful traffickers on earth. But in return for a little work they expect a great deal of enjoyment, and more than most industrious cities is Bordeaux given up to the worship of pleasure.
[Illustration: THE PALAIS CALLIEN AT BORDEAUX.]
From Bordeaux I continued down the river until I saw the Dordogne join the Garonne, where both are lost in the Gironde. Here the two beautiful and noble streams, one flowing from the Auvergne mountains, and the other from the Pyrenees, no sooner embrace than they die on the breast of the salt wave. They and their tributaries caused one of the sternest, and yet one of the most smiling, of regions—a country where Nature seems to have the passion of contrast, and where she brings forth all the best fruits of the earth—to be named by the Celts the Land of Waters, and by the Romans Aquitania. A little reflection explains why the English of the Middle Ages, having once possessed it, should have clung to it with such tenacity. Less easy is it to understand why so few of their descendants of to-day feel the peculiar spell that almost every rood of this broad land should cast upon them, apart from the charm of old story and of the picturesque that appeals to all.
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE ITINERARY of 'TWO SUMMERS IN GUYENNE' and'WANDERINGS BY SOUTHERN WATERS']
AGRICULTURE in the Corrèze,in Périgord,Albigenses, The,Ales,Angelus, The,Angling,Architecture:Byzantine,Gothic,Renaissance,Roman,Romanesque,Argentat,Arnaud (Arnaud Daniel, troubadour),Artaud, The (River),Aspic, The,Aubeterre,Aulaye, St.,Auvergnats, Descent of the,
Barthélemy, St.,Bastides,Bazas,Bazile, St.,Beaulieu,Beüne, Valley of the,Beynac,Boëtie, Etienne de la,Boleti,Bordeaux,Bordelaises,Born, Bertrand de,Bort,Bourdeilles,Brantôme,Abbey of,Pierre de Bourdeilles,Brède (La),Buckwheat,Buisson (Le),Bureau, Jean,
Cacolets, Cadouin, Abbey of, Cadurci, The, Caesar at Uxeliodunum, Carthusians of Vauclair, Castillon, Battle of, Castres (Gironde), Cazoulès, Cemeteries, Rural, Céou, The (River), Cépes, Chandos, Château d'Aubeterre, de Beynac, de Biron, de Bourdeilles, des Eyzies de Fâges, de Fénelon, de Grignols (Talleyrand), de Gurçons, de Hautefort, de Marouette, de Montaigne, de Montesquieu, de Nabinaud, de Villandraut, Chavannon, Gorge of the, Christy, Mr., Clement V., Pope, Coiffure at Mont-Dore, in the Bordelais, in the Corrèze, in Périgord, Coligny, Condé, Madame de, Court-Mantel, Henry, Coutras, Coux, Crayfish, Cyprien, St.,
Denis, St.,Domme,Dordogne, Valley of the,Double, The,Dovecots,Droit Seigneurial,Dronne, Valley of the,
Échourgnac,Églisottes, Les,Eleanor of Aquitaine,Émilion, St.,English, The, at Bordeaux,at Castillon,at Domme,at Les Eyzies,at Libourne,at Martel,at Montpont,at St. Émilion,at St. Cyprien,at Sarlat,at Tayac,Eyquem.SeeMontaigneEyzies, Les,
Fâge, La,Fénelon,Frogs,Fronsac,Front, St., Cathedral of,Funeral Customs,
Gallien, Le Palais,Garonne, Valley of the,Gipsies,Gironde, The (River),Girondins, The,Gorge of Hell, The,Goth, Bertrand de,Grand-Brassac,Groléjac,Guyenne, English rule in,
Hautefort,Huguenots,
Ilex, The,Implements, Flint,Isle, Valley of the,
Jongleur, The modern,
Knolles, Robert,
Landes (of the Gironde),Langon,Laplau,Leaguers, The,Leopard, The English (Heraldic),Libourne,Limeuil,Lisle,The Lord,Luxège, The (River),
Macaire, St.,Madeleine, La,Malaria,Man, Prehistoric,Marcillac,Martel,Charles,Master and servant,Méré, Poltrot de,Messeix,Métayage,Michel-Bonnefare, St.,Miremont, Cavern of,Modières,Mondane, St.,Montaigne, Michel,Montesquieu,Montpont,Mothe-Montravel, La,Moustier, Le,Nabinaud,Neuvic,Normans, The, in Périgord,
Orgues de Bort,Oriel, The golden,Owls,
Pantaléon, St,Peasant-proprietor, The,Périgord Noir,Périgueux,Plantagenet, Henry,Plateau, Great Central, of France,Plough, Ancient form of,Poaching,Politics, Local,Port-Dieu,Puy d'Issolu,
Raymond II., Viscount of Turenne,Religious Customs,Riberac,Roche Canillac, La,Chalais, La,Romance Language, The,Roque-Gageac, La,Rue, The (River),
Salignac, François de.SeeFénelon,Sarlat,Saut de la Saule, Le,Sauterne, The vintage at,Sauve, St.,Savennes,Sébastien, Dom,Secondat, Charles de.SeeMontesquieu,Servières,Shroud, The Holy,Siorac,Snail-eaters,Songs of Périgord,Souillac,Spinning-wheels,Superstition,
Taillefer,Talbot,Tarde, Jean,Tayac, La Roque de,Church of,Tocane St. Apre,Tocsin, The,Tour de Mareuil,de Vésone,Trappists,Troglodytes,Truffles,Turenne,Tursac,
Uxellodunum,Vauclaire, La Chartreuse de,Vayrac,Verdelais,Vérère, Valley of the,Victor, St.,Villandraut,Villefranche de Longchapt,Villeinage,Vin de plaine,Vins du pays,Vintage, The, In the Bordelais,Viper, The Red,
Wages,Wolves,
End of Project Gutenberg's Two Summers in Guyenne, by Edward Harrison Barker